


At The Wolf's Joint

by apfelgranate



Series: Gleipnir's Forging [1]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/M, Trespasser
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2016-11-17
Packaged: 2018-08-31 14:43:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8582386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apfelgranate/pseuds/apfelgranate
Summary: “You must understand; I do not do this lightly. The elves lost everything because of me. I did this to my people, and I must restore them.”“Don’t give yourself too much credit. You didn’t call Exalted Marches on them, you didn’t create alienages, you didn’t enslave them! Maybe you tore the world apart, but that’s not why it’s in shambles now!”Saar and the Dread Wolf have a talk.





	

The mage’s great body drops, not as a felled tree but as a fine scarf, folding gently towards the ground. The chest gapes open, a flower made of bone and blood and viscera. The scent of lightning is still thick upon the air, now joined by the stench of entrails.

Saar watches the Qunari fall, the light go from their eyes. The remnants of her exploded barrier flicker like sparks within the hollow where their heart and lungs once resided. The sawed-off horns, the shattered chains and mask, the scars about the mouth…

 _Saarebas._ The word is a knife in her side, angled up beneath her ribs to pierce her heart. That would have been her, in another life. Her knees buckle under her, not for pain, now – her left arm has gone numb as though frozen – but because the air has turned to ice in her lungs. She wants to retch but nothing but bitterness burns her throat, she wants to howl and scream but nothing but a pitiful sob comes free.

“Boss!” Suddenly Bull is there, slings his arm around her waist and drags her to her feet again. “C’mon, up with you, there you go—” Dorian takes her arm and slathers it with the last of their poultices. She doesn’t feel a thing, but she can see the liquid sizzle and smoke where it touches the searing green of the anchor. His mouth twists in the pained mockery of a smile; blood seeps from a slash that had nearly taken out his eye.

“Worth a try,” he says, his voice a raw, quiet thing. “We should hurry.”

Saar grunts her assent; she locks her knees and pushes herself upright. Cassandra eyes her with that pinched expression that means she wants to charge at someone like a battering ram, for they are all wounded, cracked and fraying, and they cannot turn around. She has grabbed Varric by the collar to keep him from falling over, but it’s clear he’s in even worse shape than Saar, his skin sallow and bloodless. The front of his embroidered shirt glints darkly, like it is glossy, oiled leather. They all know it is not.

“Stay,” Saar says with the finger of her good hand pointed at dwarf and human, and then, because it is Cassandra, she adds, “Guard our backs. ‘S an order.”

Varric collapses with a grateful sigh and Cassandra glares helplessly, and Saar gives her a weak, bloody smile, then pats Iron Bull on the shoulder to signal him to move. She’ll have to come up with an excuse to leave him and Dorian behind as well, but her mind is mired in fog, only one bright point rising above the mists: _Get to Solas, alone_.

The eluvian’s ever-shifting surface glows, a thing far too bright and gentle for what so often had lain behind it. She grits her teeth and lets go of Bull, pushes Dorian’s steadying hand away. Stepping through the eluvian is like stepping through a suspended waterfall; but afterwards, there are no sopping wet robes, no hint that one had just tricked the space and shape of the world.

On the other side, statues greet them. Saar’s gaze flickers from grey stone face to grey stone face, up the hill leading to a gleaming shape that has to be yet another eluvian. Her eyes burn and she looks away, casts her gaze closer again, over the horned, hulking statues… 

“Ah, _shit_ ,” mutters Iron Bull. They are not statues, and Saar’s world grows fuzzy at the edges again, her breath a thin, fleeting thing.

Her little wolf’s teeth have become a lot sharper.

“You two stay here,” she commands, draws herself up tall and imposing like she is not trembling; a tremor that seems to weave itself into the very fabric of her bones.

“Don’t be ridiculous, you can barely walk,” Dorian says with an edge of panic. “Amatus, tell her she’s being ridiculous.”

But Iron Bull remains silent. He watches her, and perhaps he has figured it out as well, perhaps he can read it in her face – the Viddasala’s words ring in her ears: _You have been deceived by that agent of Fen’Harel, Solas_ – and he shakes his head. “Boss’ll be fine,” he says, leans back, sinks down with a heavy groan to rest against the gilt frame of the eluvian, holds out his blood-streaked hand. “C’mere, let me look at that wound on your temple.”

Dorian swallows a snarl, he looks from Bull to her, back and again, and she sees the moment he gives in, how the strength leaves his spine and his shoulders slope. His staff drops from his hand, the grip gone lax.

“If you get yourself killed,” he says, swaying on his feet like a willow bowing to the wind, “I will be _incredibly_ cross with you, is that understood?”

Saar laughs, a hollow sound that rattles through her ribcage as though her bones have shaken loose. She doesn’t wait to see him fold himself against Bull’s side, or watch the evidence of all their exhaustion come to light when she still must go on. Strength is not what has carried them this far, but desperation and stubbornness and rage, and hers are all but spent. Even her heart is too weak to race, beating instead the slow, mountain-heavy beat of a forge, hammer and anvil, and she is caught in the middle.

She staggers her way forward, past the dozens upon dozens of petrified Qunari, staggers and stumbles and catches herself on an outstretched arm here, an axe held low there. Then there are stairs, old and overgrown with green and red. She breathes, casts her gaze around herself. This place would be beautiful, under any other circumstances; the pink-golden light flows over towering arches and pillars, over the trees with their delicate little red leaves, the bursting green, the yellow and white blooms of flowers amidst the grass and brush. The blossoms are tiny, countless and fragrant with something sweet she can’t place, so unlike the red-white-wet flower of the mage’s chest—

 _No. No, go forward, go on, there is nothing behind you_. If she looks back, she will fall and not get up.

The top of the stairs. Voices, in the distance. She presses on.

“…araas kata!” The Viddasala.

“Your forces have failed.” Shadows become shapes become people. “Leave now, and tell the Qunari to trouble me no further.”

She sees them now, both Qunari and elf with their backs to her, their silhouettes outlined by the glow of the eluvian like puppets in shadow play. The Viddasala has a spear in her hand, and for a second Saar thinks she will throw it at Solas – it has to be him, her hand is numb but her arm feels as though it is being eaten alive, poison and fire biting their way through her veins up to her shoulder, _she needs it to be him_ – but then the Viddasala spits, her shoulders sag, and she turns around. Defeated but alive.

Her gaze alights on Saar and the wrath returns; Saar can practically see how it flows into the Qunari’s limbs, turns her deadly and furious once more.

“You,” comes a hiss floating across the distance between them. The spear rises, its point aimed at Saar’s heart. “You shall have mercy, Inquisitor.”

Saar’s mind goes blank, then floods. She’s half dead, her magic is drained, she can barely control the anchor’s wilful destruction, she lost her sword three eluvians ago and her staff is already a nigh unbearable weight across her back, the only viable weapon is the dagger on her belt—

The spear never flies. The Viddasala freezes, and between one blink and the next, her skin turns to rock, her clothes, her weapon. Saar’s stomach heaves, acrid bitterness clawing at the back of her throat. Pain lances along her arm and she gasps, keens as she goes to her knees; the pain steals her air, steals her sight, it turns the world into nothing but blinding white and the roar of her blood between her ears.

Then it fades.

Slender brown fingers curl beneath her left hand, hold it in a gentle grasp. The anchor simmers, flickers, calmed to a fraction of its all-consuming glare from moments ago. The feeling has returned to her hand, and the fingers touching her are warm. Solas’s hands had always been warm, even in the cold hours of dawn…

She looks up.

“That should give us more time,” he says, quietly. She blinks, he lets go.

 _It’s really him_. He looks the same, though his hair is shorn short entirely. He smells the same, almost. The warm dusty scent of chalk and pigment from his frescos no longer lingers, but wood and earth have remained, sharp crushed-herbs smell and sweat and fur. The fur—

He has kept the pelt-edged cloak she gave him the first time they went into the Emprise’s freezing wastes.

Her right hand fists into the fabric of his cloak, her knuckles skid over the glinting plate beneath, she drags him forward. He tastes the same, too. A soft noise escapes him as she kisses him, she bites him and his lips part, the heat of his mouth so familiar it plays havoc with her memories; for a fleeting, splintered moment it is as though the last two years never happened.

When she lets him go, a noisy breath feathers from his mouth. “I—I suspected you had questions,” he whispers, a shiver buried shallowly below the words. “I must admit, I did not expect this.”

“I’m getting to those,” she grunts. Maker, she wants to kiss him again. She wants to kiss him, she wants to haul him over the coals for leaving the way he did, she wants to drag him back to Skyhold, she wants to pretend so badly—

But she has more than questions. She has suspicions, a legion of them all lined up like soldiers upon the mountainside, waiting for battle; some have grown tall with certainty. Her next words slip from her just like she lost her sword: quiet and careless with exhaustion.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’re Fen’Harel?”

He stares at her—and then he laughs, almost, the sound of it small, fragile, fond.

“Well done,” he says. 

“That’s not an answer,” she says. “I was bleeding out in a fucking snowbank with Corypheus’s claws stuck in my belly, and even then you _didn’t_ _tell me_. Why?”

He avoids her eyes and draws a shuddering breath, like he is hurting. _Good_. A small part of her is viciously grateful for it, to see that pain paid forward; the pain she felt when he left and gave her only a fraction of an explanation, of a goodbye.

“What could I have said?” he finally asks, voice cracking. “That I am the great betrayer of Dalish myth? The one who imprisoned their gods and destroyed their world?”

“That you’re one of the ancient elves would’ve been a start! I saw the murals, the memories in the library—you _freed_ them. Why would I hate you for that?”

His fingers curl around her right hand, gently entangle the iron grip she has on his cloak, and he bends to kiss her knuckles. “Forgive me,” he whispers against the bloodied skin. “I was—”

She cuts him off. “Save the apologies for later. For _once_ , tell me the truth. All of it.”

For a long moment, he only looks at her, his gaze travelling along the lines of her face like he is attempting to commit it to irrevocable memory. The thought rolls through her mind sticky like honey, catching memories: the first mural he ever drew, the burning sword, the wolves, arranged around her like a starburst halo; how he had sat watching her for hours, sketching the shape of her shoulders, the curl of her horns.

He lets her hand go, and he climbs to his feet with the slow, measured care of an old man whom age has bowed and broken and not allowed to die.

“Solas,” he says, “I was Solas first. Fen’Harel came later, after—” He turns away, folding his hands behind his back in a motion she’s seen a hundred times, the frame of his body tense. “It was what the Evanuris called me, to warn their people away. But the Dread Wolf gave his own people hope, and instilled fear in his enemies, and so that is what I became. It was—is a mantle I bear. Not unlike Inquisitor, I suppose.”

“If I had taken the title ‘oxman,’ yeah, maybe,” Saar says, her voice carrying a sharp sting.“So I’ve been letting a masked god into my bed for over a year, I figured that out the second I found one of your murals in the crossroads. What else?”

Abruptly, he turns around again and looks to her. She has not stood up, and he must realize she’s not going to; his gaze flits from her left hand to her battered shoulder, the dent in her breastplate, the blood that stains the right half of her stomach all the way down onto her thigh.

“You have to know,” he says with quiet, pained intensity, “I have never lied about my feelings for you. I have omitted—many things, about what I am, about my past, but with you—it was the first time in, in eons, that I was Solas rather than Fen’Harel.”

She watches him, the fractured desperation in his face, the all-too familiar way an urgency for touch brims in the contained lines of his body.

“Yeah,” she whispers, “I’m starting to see that, little wolf. Who are you now?”

He laughs again, that small, broken sound that barely deserves the name, and he tells her: a god who is not a god, who saw the rise of those like him and their ascent to greed and cruelty, who fought for those who had neither voice nor power, who saw only one way out when the Evanuris murdered one of their own.

“Mythal isn’t exactly dead, is she?” Saar grunts, swaying with dizziness as she tries to stay upright.

“No; the first of my people do not die easily. But whom you met possesses but a fraction of her old power. Without her influence and intervention, the Evanuris would have destroyed the entire world in their lust for power.”

“And your only way out…?”

“The Veil. I sealed the Fade away from the world, and with it, the Evanuris.”

She blinks, her mind tripping over too many memories clicking into place to form the portrait of a changed world bearing down on a wounded wolf.

“That—that explains _so much_. So the—the library, the magic, the immortality?”

“All of it was dependent on the presence of the Fade. When I sealed it away, the world of the elves fell to ruin.” He chuckles softly, bitterly. “The Dalish are correct about that much: I destroyed the elvhen people.”

“They seem pretty alive to me,” Saar says. Solas says nothing, and she is too tired to argue the point; exhaustion has made a home inside her bones, a great, numbing palace that stretches from her feet to her fingertips.

“You should have told me. Do you really think I wouldn’t have understood?”

He swallows, voice thick and wavering as he speaks: “I had hoped you would, but… It is not only that which I have kept from you.”

Saar nearly laughs. “Andraste’s tits, what could be worse than ‘I fundamentally changed the fabric of the world’?”

“The orb – the elvhen focus – it was mine. I gave it to Corypheus. Not personally, but I had my agents allow him to locate it.”

She stares at him.

“What.”

His face grows stoic, closes off and empties of all expression, and Saar feels as though the ground is cracking beneath her.

“Why _on earth_ would you do that?”

His voice washes over her, the explanation, the justification, and her blood roars in her ears, she wants to scream, to stand and grab him, to wipe that blank expression off his face with her _claws—_

“Even if we all were tranquil,” she bites out, “we’re still _people_.” Her vision swims as she tries to push herself to her feet, staggering.

“I know,” she hears him say. “You’ve shown me I was wrong about many things. It doesn’t make what I must do next any easier.”

Saar goes still.

“What do you mean?” she asks, tonelessly. The ground under her seems to crack quicker now, and she wills herself to stay standing with her teeth digging into the inside of her cheek, to not give into the freefall that is waiting for her with arms opened wide like a long-lost lover.

“Even without the anchor’s power, there is still hope for my people. But it will mean the end of yours.”

There is blood in her mouth now. Thoughts whip behind her eyes like her mind is trying to rip loose from the moorings of her body—

 _You’re lying_ —

 _You have_ _to be lying—_

 _Please tell me you’re lying, you can’t mean_ _that—_

“You must understand; I do not do this lightly,” he says – gently, patiently, as though she will somehow _understand_ – “The elves lost _everything_ because of me. _I_ did this to my people, and I must restore them.”

“Don’t give yourself too much credit,” she hisses. “You didn’t call Exalted Marches on them, you didn’t create alienages, you didn’t enslave them! Maybe you tore the world apart, but that’s not why it’s in shambles now!”

“Saar—”

“You want a better future for elves? I can give it to them! To everyone! You think Tevinter or the Qunari will stop me? I lead the most powerful organization in all of southern Thedas! I’ve killed two gods already! I’ve brought the fucking _Chantry_ to heel!” She pants, her lungs burning.“Solas—just imagine what I could do with you by my side. Come back and _help me_.”

He stares at her, eyes wide; for the space between two heartbeats he seems less like a wounded wolf and more like a trapped deer. He shakes his head, eyes never leaving her face.

“Not with the Inquisition. It has grown too large, and now corruption festers inside it.”

“What would _you_ know of that?”

“Betrayal follows power like a shadow. The reason I discovered the Qunari’s plans was because my spies in the Inquisition tripped over _their_ spies in the Inquisition. The elven guard who intercepted the gaatlok barrels? She was one of mine.”

A hard, bitter laugh bursts from her. “Of course she was.” She clenches her fists as the anchor begins to pulse again, grits her teeth and speaks through heavy breaths: “It doesn’t matter now. You know I’m right: This world is already different than what you woke up to, because of _me_ —”

Any reply is drowned in green fire; the sudden pain is dazing, makes her quake on weakened knees. Something touches her and she reels back.

“Vhenan, just let me heal you—”

“Don’t fucking call me that,” she grits out, uselessly trying to back away. Her legs no longer obey her, and it’s only a question of seconds until they will give out under her—

“Vhenan, please.”

“Shut _up_!” she snarls. He is close now, close enough for her to lash out and grab him, her fingers closing around his throat. They go down like a thunderclap, Saar’s weight driving his body down against the ground; his armor screeches as it drags across stone. The anchor howls and bites at her, and oh, it is so much easier to pretend that it is the only reason sobs burn in her throat, her eyes stinging wet with tears. “You don’t get to call me that anymore! You don’t get to claim you love me when you’re planning to destroy my world!”

His pulse drums against her palm, a frantic flutter like a caught bird. For a split second, there is only one thought in her head, bright like veilfire: _I could kill him_. _Would he let me?_

For a split second, they remain frozen, caught in that moment. And then the pain catches up to Saar again and she keens, doubling over as Solas’s body shifts through the Fade right from underneath her, reforming just in time to catch her before she hits the ground.

Out of the corners of her eyes she sees his own eyes light up, and she sags in on herself as the pain dulls to a muffled roar.

“Blighted—fucking—asshole…” she groans, her face resting against his shoulder. She can taste bile at the back of her throat, exhaustion burning with cold in every fiber of her body. She is so, so tired. “You can’t tell me you actually _want_ to do this.”

“What I want is of no consequence,” Solas replies as his hand moves over her arm. There is emotion in his voice again. Pain bleeding in through the cracks between the words, guilt flying along on the exhale of his breath.

“Ancestors, you can’t be fucking serious.”

“I am. There is no other way. I—I am sorry.”

The cold spreads through her chest, turns the blood in her veins to snow. The eye of the storm has found her now, she floats upon a lake of ice and lightning, feels as though the world is breaking away around them in the whipping hail and wind. But at the center, in the space between her and the god who is not a god, there is only deadly stillness and cold.

“This world is changing,” she says. “ _I_ have changed it, and I’m far from done.”

He averts his eyes. She sees how his throat moves, the sinews in his neck. Tense and release. Wounded.

She tries to straighten, to lift her head, manages neither. But her hand obeys, the hand still sparking green and dripping blood, and she fumbles it to slap against the side of his face, makes him look upon her.

“I’m not going to let you do this,” she says quietly, with intent: the words roll from her mouth as a knife drawn from its sheath. Metal on metal, hiss and sparks. “I don’t care what it takes, I’ll make you see you’re wrong. This world is mine, and I won’t let you destroy it.”

Solas’s mouth twists into a shape that could almost pass for a smile; his fingers curl over her hand and he turns his face into the touch. He kisses her palm, eyes glowing. Saar lets out a soft noise as pain turns utterly to numbness.

“I know,” he whispers. “And I am grateful. That means more to me than you can imagine.”

_Oh._

Her hand falls from his grasp, he stands, he turns around, he leaves her. The eluvian glows like a rising sun—

_Oh, there it is._

—and swallows the shape of him and flickers to darkness.

Saar sags onto her back. There is a laugh trapped somewhere between her throat and her teeth; it gets worn down by her slow, thunderous heartbeat, until it finally escapes into the rising night as a sharp little huff of air. She smiles.

_Oh, there it is, Dread Wolf. You hesitated._

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the Prose Edda (specifically stanza 25 if you wanna look it up), where 'wolf's joint' refers to the wrist.


End file.
